Gears Quietly Turning
by JadeEye
Summary: A Motoki/Lita centered fic.


A/N: It didn't feel quite fair to leave Lita and Motoki out in the cold while ReiNuma and SereDare got so much attention. But when I started writing about them, they led me in a quite different direction than the other two couples. I would very much like to know if you think they could possibly feel this way.

Note: I'm fairly certain that STC Motoki is not like the Motoki in this story. He may have some of the same feelings, sometimes, but they are to a far, far lesser degree than the ones depicted here.

Disclaimer: I don't own anything.

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The Gears, Quietly Turning

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Lita and Motoki are the couple that is most frequently overlooked. Even, Lita sometimes thinks, by Motoki himself.

She watches him now, as he leans against the counter, wiping crumbs from its surface, and laughs across the room with Asanuma. His eyes sweep across the arcade, and his expression, when it lands on the corner booth where Asanuma-and-Rei and Serena-and-Darien sit, is selfless, that of a father pleased to see all of his children happy and well-fed.

And yet there seems to be something sharper, more predatory in it. As though he is a prideful alpha male, pleased to see his children well-fed only because he is the one who fed them. Their happiness is proof of their dependence on him.

She calls herself melodramatic. As soon as she gets home she will block Animal Planet and the Discovery Channel from her cable. She does not want these metaphors to enable her anymore. She wants to stop. She is aware that she is imagining things, comparing him to things, plastering attributes to him that do not belong to him, because she needs to fault him, to dislike him.

She needs to justify pushing him away.

And yet, she asks herself, does she not already have enough justification? There is already the mere fact that she herself, for her happiness, has become dependent on him. So dependent that yesterday, after a whole day passed without them talking because he was in Okinawa with his family and his cell phone died, she found herself depressed.

Then angry, thinking that if he really loved her, he would find to call, even if it meant missing his sister's championship game to find a pay phone.

Then ashamed, stunned by the selfishness and obsessiveness of her thoughts.

And then back to anger again. She had not had these degrading emotions before she met him. She would never have lowered herself to such petty levels for a mere guy before him. (She may have felt the emotions, the urge to act on them, but only for brief instants before she buried them, and she had never _acted_ on them – )

To snatch back some fray of control, she flirts with the Russian exchange student in her gym class, with Crane Game Joe when he comes to the arcade during her shift. She wants to feel powerful, not as though she is the one over whom someone else (him) has power. She wants him to feel jealous and betrayed and not good enough, she wants him to question himself and wonder what he did wrong, she wants him to know that she has other options and that she doesn't need him.

But her actions make her a hypocrite, and she knows it: to retaliate against his power over her, she lashes back merely by using the same medium. Using Misha and Joe's attraction to her only sucks her further into the quicksand from which she struggles so wildly to escape. She is depending on men for everything, and she hates it.

The worst days are when she knows that it might all just be in her head. The silent power-plays, the subtle flirtation – Motoki is oblivious to them all. She is thrashing wildly to stay afloat when if she would just stop struggling, she would realize that the water is only shoulder-deep, and if she would calm down, she could stand in it. That predatory, almost contemptuous curve of his lips that she sometimes thinks she glimpses is only that, her thoughts, her imagination. He is entirely innocent (of course he is, that's why she let herself fall for him in the first place, not because he was a smooth womanizer aware of every eddy of feeling and vulnerability. She _likes_ that he is innocent and awkward. But is it bad to revel in his weaknesses? Does that mean she is taking advantage of him? These thoughts plague her). He is innocent because even while she seethes and casts suspicious glances at him from the corner of her eye, he sends a glowing, guileless grin that dims when his eyes see her frown. She lifts her lips quickly, out of reflex, out of fear (that she will lose him), out of guilt (is it that? Or does she genuinely want to keep him from pain? The answer is important).

She hates these days because at least when she is convinced that he is powerful and deliberate and knows what he is doing to her, he is an enemy. But when he is not, when he is harmless and guileless, her only enemy is herself. And she is forced to realize that Motoki or not, any boy or not, this is the way _she_ is, and she'll never escape it. Because if her mind can villainize a perfect saint like Motoki, there is no one it will allow her to accept.

That is why she needs him to be someone that she can hate. She needs him to be less than a saint because if he is not, there is no hope for her.

-

_Motoki is a generous, unselfish child. I never have to worry about him. _ These words, or some variation of them, grace the teacher comments box on Motoki's report cards every year. He does not have straight A's like Darien. He is not hailed as an artistic genius like Asanuma.

Motoki is accustomed to being the gears, quietly turning, instead of the clock hands ticking obviously around the face. Ever since Unazuki started playing softball and his father realized that she had a future in the professional leagues, Motoki has compensated, as best as he can, to let them both chase that dream. He has smoothed over their mother's absence and kept to arcade running smoothly. Perhaps he has smoothed over too much, for somewhere in his compensating, his face appears to have become smooth, too, leveled into a gentle smile that has become his default personality.

Like a broom his eyes sweep across the arcade in front of him, and they land on his paired-off friends in the corner booth, the friends whom he helped to knit into couples. Reflexively, his face crinkles into a wider smile.

He feels slightly alarmed, sometimes, by the depth to which these conditioned expressions run. When he learned about Pavlov's ringing bells and salivating dogs in his psychology class last semester, he felt a sudden stifled panic, an unwelcome identification with those dogs, for he knew that each time the bells on the arcade door jingled, his head jerked up with that customary smile on it.

This would not be so bad, perhaps, except that the customary customer's smile extends not just to customers walking into the arcade but to his father, to his sister, to his friends, to Asanuma, at this very moment, as he laughs automatically at the joke that his blond friend tosses across the room.

This smoothed-over personality (which is no one's fault but his, he tells himself) certainly must be the reason he sometimes feels such contempt for his friends. The reason that, as he scrubs milkshake glasses and ketchup-caked plates and listens to their idle, flirtatious chatter, he finds himself feeling petty and malicious and jealous. The more jealous he feels, the brighter his smile grows, until sometimes he feels that he is a light bulb about to sizzle into a shower of sparks.

He often wonders on how much of this they pick up, for he is not so naïve as to think that his high-IQed friends (no matter how socially inept Darien may sometimes be), would not notice. But if they pick up on it, they never show it.

The only one he ever catches watching him as though she has noticed is Lita. While he would rather stick his hand down the garbage disposal than be confronted by his friends about his jealousy, for some reason he feels equally desperate that Lita _does_ find out. He wants her to confront him.

His breath catches when he sees her eyes, brows furrowed, on him, and an instant (like the moment before his foot comes down on a stair, when he is not sure that anything will catch him) chips the breath from his lungs.

But before he can fall into empty air, that reflexive grin jars onto his face, his foot lands hard on the next stair, and she twists her lips into a returning grin. The flare of suspicion fades back into her dark green eyes.

Guilt accompanies this deception, just as it accompanied his seething resentment of his father's refusal to let him miss a single inning of Unazuki's game to find a pay phone to call Lita yesterday. It is only this guilt that keeps him grounded, buttoned inside this affable persona that he wears: he knows that if he can feel guilt for deceiving her, guilt for wanting to punch his father in the face, he cannot be as hopelessly despicable as he often feels.

He feels selfish, sometimes (always), trapped by the thought that he is taking advantage of her, keeping her distrusting nature alive when he knows that she would rather leave it behind in the ashes of her past, keeping it alive because he needs someone to hold an unfogged mirror to his face. He knows, as he watches her laugh with Crane Game Joe, that she is flirting with him because she wants to bait some reaction from him. But all he can feel is grateful. Even though he knows that he should feel ashamed (he is letting her lower herself below her own morals because he is too weak to show even a small bit of himself) and angry (because that is what she wants, for him to be angry with her for flirting with another guy). Even though what he should feel is anger at himself (for sitting back and allowing her to try to pull him out without making any attempt to pull _himself_ out). He knows all the things he should feel, but all that he feels is relief and a deep, deep sense of security.

Because she distrusts him. As long as she distrusts him, they will never have a perfect relationship, and Motoki needs that. Because he knows that perfection is false.

That is why he needs her to distrust him. He needs her to keep what they have from becoming perfect because if it does, he will know that it is not true.

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She needs what he is. He needs what she does. The notches fit.

They will keep turning.

Quietly.

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A/N: Review. Please.


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